Sergey Brin Presentation at Berkeley October 6, 2006

They wrote their search engine as if they were developing it for a king. They didn’t worry about the limitations of computer power or scaling to billions of users. They wrote the best application they could for one user. When they were happy with it, they scaled it up. They try to take that approach with all of their applications.

They weren’t out to build a better search engine. They were just a couple of grad students mapping links on the internet. They accidentally discovered that using those links to rank the pages by popularity would give better search results.

It was a pretty low risk move for them to start the company. If it didn’t work out, they could just go back and finish their degrees. They are still on a leave of absense after 12 years.